they're turning places like Reddit into machine learning training grounds to simulate phoney seemingly human conversations.

I suspect Reddit has been doing this for almost ten years and is way more advanced than a lot of people here would expect.

Story time. I used to post often on a small subreddit about a niche, controversial theory. One day, I received an unsolicited private message from an account I had never seen post in that subreddit. This account would send me unsolicited rambling messages that just happened to include mundane details about my real life, like my pet's name, a place I used to live, etc. It truly felt like some glowie took my real life information, my internet history, fed it all into a prototype AI training program, and sent the AI after me on either a phishing expedition or as a distraction. I know Reddit has a lot of weirdos, but this just didn't feel human. When I started ignoring it, the account started sending me suicidal messages to bait me into chatting with it.

It all got very unsettling, so I stopped using that Reddit account entirely. Just never logged in again. Unfortunately, I was dumbass and had previously tied that account to an email address. This led to all sorts of automatic account email notifications that I'd delete without reading. A few years after abandoning the account, I received an email on my birthday that my Reddit account was permanently banned. I do not believe the timing was coincidental.